There were two prints of baby murder accused Dina Rodrigues’ right thumb on the back of a waybill found at the scene of the killing, a police fingerprint expert told the Cape Town High Court on Thursday.
The potentially damning evidence from Inspector Jan Bester followed his testimony on Wednesday identifying other prints on the document as being those of two of her co-accused, Sipho Mfawe and Zanethemba Gwada.
The state claims Rodrigues hired the men to kill baby Jordan-Leigh Norton in June last year, and that they posed as parcel deliverymen to gain entrance to the Nortons’ Retreat, Cape Town, home.
The court has already heard a Speed Freight services employee say he gave Rodrigues blank waybills at her place of work two weeks before the killing.
On Thursday Bester told the court that he had been unable to conclusively match the waybill prints with an initial set of Rodrigues’ prints he got from investigating officer Inspector Esmerald Bailey, because of the poor quality of the set.
Rodrigues either had very fine ridges on her fingers, or there had been ”a lot of sweat” on her fingers when they were taken, he said. Although he had been unwilling to make a sworn affidavit at that stage, he had told Bailey he believed the thumb prints matched.
When a second set of prints was taken from Rodrigues, he found seven points of correspondence on one print, and nine on the other.
Seven were enough for a conclusive match, he said.
He could find no ”inexplicable points of difference” between the waybill prints and Rodrigues’ set.
Rodrigues, Mfazwe, Gwada, Mongezi Bobotyane and a 16-year-old youth face charges of murder, conspiracy to murder, armed robbery, the illegal possession of a firearm and ammunition, and intimidation.
Rodrigues’s lover at the time of the slaying, school teacher Neil Wilson, had fathered Jordan-Leigh with a previous girlfriend, and Wilson was being asked to pay maintenance. – Sapa